Werner Herzog is 82 years old today.
He was born on the 5th of September 1942 in Munich, Germany.
He is a filmmaker, actor, author and opera director.
Herzog is regarded as a pioneer of New German Cinema.
When crafting narrative feature films he famously avoids using storyboards and keeps pre-planning to a minimum in favor of filming on the fly, encouraging improvisation and placing his cast and crew into real situations mirroring those in the film and just filming it.
His films often feature ambitious protagonists with impossible dreams, people with unusual talents in obscure fields or individuals in conflict with nature and their surroundings.
As well as narrative filmmaking he is also a critically acclaimed documentarian.
I believe this man is a genius.
Over the next few weeks I will be publishing a series of blogs covering his 62 year career as a filmmaker. He has made short films, narrative feature films, short documentaries & feature length documentary films and he has 74 directing credits to his name so I won't be covering everything and some things won't be mentioned but I am planning on pulling info from a few sources and publishing a comprehensive list of his director credits.
For the blog I will focus on his productions that I feel are significant either culturally or for Herzog's career.
I'm calling the blog “The Ambitious Visionary” because the absolutely 100% perfect description of Herzog is “Radical Dreamer” but that name has been taken by a 2022 documentary film about the man himself.
